In many business and non-business fields, large computing systems exist where massive data is continuously produced. Business Intelligence (BI) is one area where fast data processing is desired. BI developers create data “mining” and analysis tools to facilitate business decision making. For example, in telecommunications, BI applications based on call-detail record (CDR) analysis (such as applications for intelligent charging, customer behavior analysis and fraud detection) are considered important tools. Hundreds of millions of CDRs, each containing details of calls passing through system exchanges, for example, are created every minute in some telecommunications systems. Creating BI applications with low latency to process massive amounts of data, such as CDR record streams, is a formidable task.
Sensing and monitoring systems are other examples of systems where massive data is produced and low latency analysis is desired. A scientific monitoring system, such as one to track vehicle exhaust output, may create huge amounts of sensor reading data.
For systems generating large amounts of data, there is great interest in low latency processing and analysis of the generated data.
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